Kangurum

» see kangurum.com.tr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The front page of kangurum.com.tr in January 2007 is nine lines of JavaScript that look at the address you arrived on and decide which shop to drop you into. If the domain contains migros, you go to shop number 1, the supermarket. If it contains kurban, you go to shop number 97. Kurban is the sacrifice at Kurban Bayramı, which in the 2000s was moving online across Turkey in the form of paying an organization to handle it on your behalf. One storefront, one product catalog, and a branch of it reachable only if you had typed a different domain name.

Migros Türk started selling over the web in 1997 under the name sanal market, virtual market, which makes it one of the earliest grocery operations online anywhere. By 1999 it was clear the thing worked, and the decision, in the words of the people who made it, was to move up from being a grocer to being a shopping center. Kangurum opened on 24 February 2000 with a set of partner retailers in the catalog, and the Turkish press covered it by counting: one Hürriyet headline had twenty companies in the kangaroo's pocket, a Milliyet one had twenty thousand products in there.

The earliest capture, June 2000, is a page built in Microsoft FrontPage 3.0 that says Lütfen Bekleyiniz, please wait, in orange, next to a picture of a kangaroo, with a link underneath in case the redirect did not fire. That stayed the shape of the front page for the site's entire life. It was never a page. It was a doormat in front of a Java application, and the application changed names underneath it, from an unnamed servlet path in 2003 to kangurum2-web by 2006 and kangurum3-web by 2012.

I was sixteen when this opened, on the family's dial-up line, and this is the rare grave where nothing about the distance is regional. The site was in my language and its warehouse was in my country. It was simply not aimed at me: the catalog was groceries and white goods, which is the shopping the person running a household does, on a card that person holds. A teenager could browse the whole mall and was not the customer of a single shop in it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what a sanal alışveriş merkezi was ~

The virtual shopping center was a specific late-1990s idea and Turkey got a good example of it. Rather than each retailer building its own store, one operator built the checkout and the delivery, then rented shelf space inside it to brands that had neither. Migros had the one asset that made it work, which was a fleet that already delivered to home addresses in Turkish cities.

That is also why it lasted. The dot-com malls in the United States were built by companies whose only competence was the website, and they died on logistics. Kangurum was a logistics company that had added a website, so when the first-wave Turkish e-commerce brands went quiet after 2001 it simply kept delivering, because the trucks had another reason to exist.

~ shop number 97 ~

The domain-sniffing script is the most legible thing the archive kept, because it shows how many businesses were running on one installation. By 2007 the page was checking for migros, for kurban, for market and for online, and each match sent you into a different catalog on the same server. Migros was running its supermarket and its general mall out of one storefront, with a seasonal religious-holiday shop alongside them, telling all of it apart by hostname.

The title tag of that doormat page is the other artifact. From 2006 it reads Kangurum< 1, then Kangurum< 2, then in 2011 Kangurum< 6, then Kangurum< 5, and in the last capture Kangurum< 4. A number that goes up and then back down in a title tag is not a version, it is somebody's counter for which of several near-identical redirect files got deployed that week. Twelve years of a national e-commerce brand, and the front door was a file with a digit after it.

~ absorbed by the grocery arm ~

The archive brackets the ending to five months. On 22 March 2012 kangurum.com.tr was still serving its own doormat, 435 bytes, pushing you into kangurum3-web. By 11 August 2012 the same address answered with a redirect to sanalmarket.com.tr, straight into shop number 1. The mall had been reabsorbed by the supermarket it grew out of.

The agency that had been doing the design and operations work since 2005 still lists the account, and describes sanalmarket.com.tr as the new address of Migros Sanal Market, previously kangurum.com.tr. That is the whole obituary in one line on a supplier's reference page. Today kangurum.com.tr does not resolve at all, and Migros sells online under its own name, which is what it was doing in 1997 before somebody decided a supermarket should be a mall.

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